I'll be starting a review topic for this in order to keep the thread clear.

If we want to have a fear of machines becoming intelligent,...the fear should be that we won't recognize them as intelligent.

-Steven Johnson

Prologue:

Roger opened the door and walked into the room. The patient was awake. He was looking around at the room he was in, staring all the time. Probably just dazed, Roger thought. "Hello," he said. The patient didn't respond. "Well, you're lucky to be alive. If you don't remember, you were run over by a car. It's amazing how little damage it did to you, you have a few bruises and that's it." The patient still kept looking around. "You didn't have any ID on you, can you tell me your name?" Roger waved his finger in front of the patient's face and he finally noticed Roger. The patient's eyes locked onto the finger and then traveled up to look at Roger's eyes. His eyes were the brightest shade of green Roger had ever seen, and there seemed to be green veins in the white part of his eyes.

An electric current ran through the quartz crystal, causing it to vibrate. A program kept track of this vibration, updating the time data at a rate equal to the vibration of the quartz crystal. The time data increased from 6:59:55 AM to 6:59:56 AM, 6:59:57 AM, 6:59:58 AM, 6:59:59 AM, 7:00:00 AM. A second program was watching the time data. Because the time data had reached the point that the program had been set to keep an eye out for, it activated the alarm function.

---------

*BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP*

Jason Bolland was shaken out of his sleep by the alarm. He opened his eyes and pressed the stop button on his alarm clock. He got out of bed. He was in his early 30s, around 6 feet tall, and a bit on the skinny side. He had dark brown, hair, almost black, and brown eyes. He stretched and yawned. “The best thing about waking up is looking forward to going to sleep again,” he mumbled. He went around his morning routine, shaving, showering, brushing his teeth, dressing, and all that. He ate a bowl of cereal, and then, just before going out the door, had a cup of coffee. He walked out of his apartment and down the stairs to the ground. He held the remote key up in the air and pressed the unlock button. His car’s headlights blinked twice and he got in.

He turned the radio on. “President Carlisle held his first rally yesterday, which means that the presidential campaign has officially started. In other news, Mcaffee announced that it will release its new virus protection software ahead of schedule in order to combat the virus Thorne.exe which resurfaced a few days after they reported they had found the source of the virus and destroyed it a week ago. It will be available for free download tomorrow.”

Jason pulled up to the Future Control Industries office building and got out. He stepped into the lobby, and the nearest security camera rotated to look at him. The security system took his face and ran a search for it on the database of employees until it found a match. It noted that he had arrived for work. By the time he reached the elevator and pressed the up button, the security system had already set it for the 7th floor. He was the only one in the elevator, so the system knew that anyone getting out of the elevator would be him. It ran a quick check on him anyway, just to be sure. Whenever a security camera saw Jason, it would update his position. He had been a little uncomfortable at first about the system knowing where he was at all times, but he had gotten used to it. And, besides, at work people could see him, and they didn’t put cameras in the bathrooms.

Jason made his way to his cubicle and started on his work.

---------

A few floors up, Alan Bradley arrived for work. He entered the digitization lab and checked the data on the computer. He checked it again. He ran a search for digitize on the computer. All of the data from his experiments, all of the functions that were used by Ma3a, everything related to digitizing, was gone, and he had a very good idea of who had gotten rid of it. He sat up from his chair and walked out of the lab. Not too far from the door were two of the thugs from Fcon. “Wondering where all that data went, Mr. Bradley?” one of them said.

Alan cut right to the chase, “if you think this is going to blackmail me into giving you Ma3a, you’re wrong.”

“It’s not just Ma3a, you have 3 of our best operatives, Mr. Crown, Mr. Baza, and Ms. Popoff, and we would very much like them back.”

“They got severely corrupted when they were digitized, it’ll take a while to correct them, and I don’t think your people are up to the task. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go find out my new assignment.” With that, he walked past them and into the break room area.

This had been going on since he and his son, Jet had crashed Fcon’s mobile server. There had always been at least one of their thugs nearby, and they frequently tried to intimidate him i

Jason found the Project: Datawraith papers very hard to follow. He would occasionally find something that he could understand, but then it would go off into something else. It was obviously designed for someone who already knew the background information. Jason decided it would take him several hours to figure it out, he shouldn’t have been looking at the papers in the first place, and he really should be delivering the budget numbers.

Jason put the Datawraith papers down and got up. He turned towards the door, and that was when it opened. Two men came in. One was saying to the other, “Never leave the door open, you got tha-.” He had noticed Jason. “What are you doing in here?”

“I’m sorry, I took a wrong turn, I’ll be going now.” He started to move towards the door. He was almost out when he heard the sound of a gun being cocked behind him. uh oh, he thought. He turned around and hastily put his hands up.

“You looked at those, didn’t you?” said one of the men, gesturing towards the Datawraith papers which obviously had been messed with. It was more of a statement than a question. The other man pressed a button on the desk and a security camera up on the ceiling turned on.

It rotated to look at the men and a voice came over the loudspeaker, “what is it?”

The man holding the gun looked towards the security camera and said, “We caught this guy snooping around, he read those papers. What should we do with him?”

Whoever was speaking through the loudspeaker paused for a second, and then said, “Digitize him.”

The person behind the camera sighed and thought to himself how much he really missed Mr. Crown, Mr. Baza, and Ms. Popoff. “That’s the point; we’ll have the remaining Datawraiths derez him, that way we won’t make a mess.”

Besides the fact that Datawraith was the name of some top secret project they were working on, Jason had absolutely no idea what they were talking about. The man with the gun led him up the stairs and under one of the lasers. “Stay there,” he said. He then took a few steps back and signaled to the other man, keeping his gun on Jason. He typed something into a computer and then pressed enter.

The laser above Jason activated. Several transparent cubes appeared around him. These spread out and faded, leaving a white grid pattern on him. The laser traced down him, wherever it touched, that part disappeared, leaving the grid pattern which hung in space for a fraction of a second then faded. Finally, the laser reached his feet and those disappeared, and there was no trace of Jason.

---------

Jason opened his eyes. It didn’t make any difference. He was looking at total darkness. He turned his head left and right, and then looked down. He gasped, or he would have, but he didn’t hear anything. He saw his body, just like it had been, but more than that, he saw through it. He saw right through the skin, the muscle tissue, right down to the bone. And he could even see through that to the bone marrow. Another thing, it was all shades of gray, and it looked kind of wavy. Jason raised his right hand. He saw electricity go through the nerves to his muscles as he moved it. He moved his right hand to touch his left arm, and it went right through it.

Jason didn’t have long to think about this, because a white ring which seemed to be made out of light dropped past him. Then another, and another. He looked up and saw that they extended as far as he could see above him. He had a sensation that he was falling upward. Then, these blue shapes with glowing edges, mostly cubes and similar shapes fell toward him. Jason threw up his hands to shield himself, but they fell right through them. They got stuck inside him, all around. They adjusted themselves, locking into the right places. That happened twice more.

Jason could still speak, that was good. His voice sounded like it usually did, but with a metallic undertone to it.

The strange people in front of Jason looked at each other, looking confused. Or as confused as they could look with a few shapes for a face. The two with the triangular objects pointed them at him, and one walked over to a glowing sphere floating a few inches away from the wall. It was light blue with intricate circuitry like designs on it. On the side facing away from the wall, it had a gray ring with yellow squares on it. The being touched the ring and it rotated around to the other side. A ring of blue shapes appeared behind the sphere. Above the sphere, a panel appeared, just hanging in the air. On the panel were several moving vertical yellow lines made up of characters Jason couldn’t decipher from this distance, and in front of that, a symbol made up of a purple oval with 3 black triangles going towards the middle.

The being spoke to the panel, and it spoke back, though it wasn’t any language he had ever heard. The best Jason could approximate it sounding like was this:

*Elo kervy on weqis.*

*Lon oles es poort?*

*Elto ifun ition ificid vorty erwes utiz ifun yuniris.*

*Riyhe woleg isutret.*

The voices had the same metallic quality his voice had, but the voice coming from the panel was also had some slight static. The ring of blue shapes and the panel disappeared, and the grey ring pivoted back to its earlier position. The being turned to the rest of the group and told them something in the same language. They nodded. One of the ones with a triangular object lowered it. Then he suddenly turned transparent and moving much faster than he had seen anyone move, ran toward him, leaving a line of purple energy in his wake. The being turned opaque again when he was a few inches in front of Jason, then grabbed him with one hand and lifted him up. He pressed a shape on his chest and then spoke to Jason. This time Jason could understand him perfectly. *Okay, what kind of stunt did you pull, how did you manage to get here without turning green?*

---------

Mercury stood with her back to the wall and looked around the corner. There were only 2 ICPs, she could take them. She took out her rod primitive and stepped away from the wall and into the sight of the ICPs. One of them already had his disk out, he tossed it at Mercury. She quickly swatted it out of the way and sent it bouncing around the room. The other ICP charged toward her. She ran up to him and shoved her rods so that they were on either side of the ICP’s head. Then she pressed the Start button on both. Energy surged between them and into the ICP. He writhed around and then disappeared into a mass of sparks.

The other ICP was concentrated on getting his disk back. He finally succeeded, then turned back to Mercury, only to find a Suffusion rod pressed against his chest. It fired and the energy pellets tore through him. He fell back and disappeared, leaving behind his shields which faded a few seconds later.

*ICPs, they’re getting worse every cycle,* Mercury quipped. She had been searching FCon’s server for the last few nanocycles, looking for anything related to digitization. She was now at the entrance to the digitized data receiving node. She walked in and through a corridor. There was an archive bin nearby and she accessed it. It contained a log file of the digitizations, which she downloaded. At the top was the digitization of Alan, followed by many Datawraiths, followed by many dedigitizations of Datawraiths, followed by the digitization of what became the Fcon Monster, and finally the dedigitizations of Alan and Jet. Wait, there was one more entry. Jason.exe? And it was dated just a few nanocycles ago. The log file showed it was not corrupted.

They can’t have gotten the correction algorithms back already, could they?, she thought. She started t

program found: name- Jason.exe; corruption- 0; type- userJet almost fell out of his chair. How could another user have been digitized? He typed in request communication: Jason.exe.

---------

In the computer world, Mercury heard, *Can I talk to him?*

Mercury responded, *Sure.* She stepped away from the I/O Node and told Jason, *He wants to talk to you.* He stepped up to it.

---------

A communication window with Jason.exe opened up on Jet’s laptop. Let’s see if he speaks English. He typed Who are you and how did you get digitized?.

A few seconds later, the response came back, I’m Jason Bolland. I work in Future Control Industries’ finance department. How did I get digitized? Well, I accidentally went into a room, somewhere on the 11th, 12th floor. Some guys came in, and they didn’t like me being there. They said they were going to digitize and um, derez me so they wouldn’t make a mess. And before you ask, no I do not know why I wasn’t corrupted. What are the correction algorithms anyway?.

Jet responded, There are errors that invariably happen in the digitization process. Unless you use these algorithms to correct for them, anything you digitize gets really messed up. You know the Thorne.exe virus?The response was Yeah.That was created when someone was digitized without the algorithms.What are datawraiths?Those are people that Fcon digitized in order to hack computer systems from the inside. Some of them must have gotten off the mobile server before it crashed.Mobile server?Fcon wrote that to aid the datawraithsAnd it crashed?Yeah, thanks to me and my dadWait a second, who are you anyway?I'm Jet Bradley. I work in what was the gaming department of Encom before the sale. My father, Alan Bradley, invented the digitizing processOh, and were you digitized when you crashed the server?Yes.There was a few seconds pause, and then the reply came back, This can't be real.I know it's a lot to take in at once, but we don't have a lot of time.---------

Carl Hubbard kicked the wall. It didn’t exactly hurt, it was more like getting exposed to an electric current and getting an ice cold bucket of water dumped on him at the same time. Even pain was different here. *I can’t believe he escaped,* he said. They were supposed to have been up against a corrupted user, not an intact user and that game-bot.

But then again, if things had gone as they were supposed to, they would be hacking the most secure systems in the world from the inside right now, not stuck on a particular computer doing absolutely nothing. Oh, it had been pretty cool at the start, but after a week, things had started to get really old. A week wasn’t that long in the analog universe, but when you never slept, when there was no sun, when you couldn’t eat or watch TV or do anything you usually did, it seemed a lot longer.

*Hey, look at the bright side, since he managed to get here without being corrupted, maybe they’ll be able to get us out the same way,* said Toby Resnick.

*Doesn’t look like it,* said Brian Linton, walking up to them. *This is a baseball they just digitized,* he added, holding a small gray sphere up. Where the seams would have been, there were green cracks. Small glowing green threads fell out of those cracks, landing in a little pile on the ground. He turned and threw the mess into the face of the nearest program. It broke into pieces, spilling threads all over the program and leaving a cloud of green dust hanging in the air. The program was knocked to the ground by the impact. He got up, grabbed a file that he had been carrying and ran off, muttering under his breath.

Another Datawraith walked up. They recognized him as Kevin Stamper. *Hi Kevin, I see you’re back up and running,* Carl

*I was wondering around. when suddenly, the Avatar appeared*
BHK: GHA! Hey, you've scared me! What the f*ck are you?!
Avatar: I am CyAdmin. An avatar of destiny. You have a message from the CPU. Listen:

In a time, the Internet was a peaceful place. As Jet defeated and the Corruption, total peace has returned. But as the doctor met with a survivng member of Thorne's Corruption, I'm afraid that if Thorne lives, that could mean one thing: total annihilation of the Internet. Your mission: to destroy the remaining Zealots, find Thorne's Shrine, and destroy the Corrpution Lord once and for all. I will give you the Antivirus card that is vital to this mission. If you find Thorne's shrine, use this to demolute it.

BHK: *gets the card* Neat.

CyAdmin: Off you go now. Remember, young member of the , the future of the Internet depends on you.

And so I'm gone on a quest to destroy all of the Zealots.
All this and more will be found out in:

*So where, exactly, are we going?* Jason said as he stepped off of the transport.

*We’re mostly trying to take as indirect a route as possible, so we won’t be easy to trace. There’s a large game site close, we should be able to blend in there,* Mercury replied.

They continued walking. *So how did you come to be involved in this?*

*I saved Jet from being derezzed by the ICPs when he was first digitized.*

*ICPs?*

*Intrusion Countermeasure Programs. They make sure the programs stay in line, run the firewalls, fight viruses, that sort of thing.*

*Like anti-virus software?*

*You could call them that.*

*Why was Jet about to be derezzed by them?*

*He was a new program that hadn’t been installed by the Users. He also appeared at about the same time a virus infected the system, so they thought he caused the virus. I convinced the Kernel to put him on the lightcycle grid as a prisoner gamebot.*

*What’s that?*

*He was tagged so that when he lost a game, he was derezzed.*

They had come up to what looked like some kind of golden portal. *What’s this?* Jason asked.

*It’s a data stream, just walk through it,* Mercury replied. She stepped up to the data stream and disappeared.

Jason tentatively held a hand up to it. There was a flash of light and it was as if somebody grabbed his hand and pulled it really hard, dragging the rest of his body with it. Then suddenly he was standing on the ground again. He looked around and found that he was in a different area. Mercury was standing next to him. They continued walking.

*So how’d Jet manage to escape?*

*I destroyed a tower, the debris created a ramp that he could jump the wall with.*

*And you’ve been accompanying him ever since?*

*Not really, I was derezzed shortly after while trying to help Jet and Ma3a escape from the computer. They restored me from backup a few microcycles later, while they were on Fcon’s mobile server.* She said it as if dying and being resurrected wasn’t much more astonishing than say, jumping across a canyon on a motorcycle

They had arrived at the gaming site. It was a large, squat building with yellow and blue outlining. Inside the entrance, there was a lobby with about 2 dozen data streams, and a few programs moving about.

*Hmm, I would best fit in the lightcycle areas, but that would be where they would expect me to g-* said Mercury, stopping suddenly. *Something isn’t right.*

*Huh?* Jason looked around, confused.

Suddenly, Mercury turned and smashed one of her rods against a nearby program. The program disappeared, replaced by a Datawraith, who recoiled in pain. She thrust her rods toward him, their ends blazing with electricity-right into the waiting hands of the Datawraith. The ends of the rods flashed and went dark. The glow of the rods started to dim as the Datawraith sucked the energy out of them. Mercury turned her head, *Jason, run!*

Jason dashed towards one of the data streams. He went through it and found himself in another room. It was some kind of observation platform, overlooking an arena where 2 programs were tossing disks at each other. He ran forward, trying to find some way out, when he heard the sound of a Mesh primitive firing. The shots blew chunks out of the floor. He risked a look back to see a Datawraith running after him. The Datawraith turned transparent and moved toward him-only to smack into another program.

They fell to the ground, and then Jason finally spotted an exit. It was a bridge made out of energy, leading across to another building. He was onto the bridge by the time the Datawraith got up. He was a quarter of a way across when he heard the Datawraith firing his Mesh. He looked behind him just in time to see one of the shots strike the bridge controls, destroying them. The bridge flashed once, twice, then it went out, and Jason fell.

The buildings climbed steadily higher, then SMASH. He landed on top of a transpwhere to buy abortion pill abortion types buy abortion pill online